


On Ice

by inbox



Category: Cable (Comics), Cable and Deadpool, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Punisher (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Loneliness, Loss of Parent(s), Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-09 21:50:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20516993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inbox/pseuds/inbox
Summary: Frank has met some informants in weird locations over the years. Flops, bars, subway tunnels. Wide open parking lots at abandoned malls, very awkwardly in strip club champagne rooms.A pretentious burger place fronting the north end of Central Park at 11AM on a bright Spring morning, however, has so far not been a place where people like to make contact with him. They usually don’t text on his private number either, the one given out to people he could count on one hand. Random informants sure as shit don’t text ‘we gotta talk about nathan’ and send him a link to some place where a basic cheeseburger costs ten fuckin’ bucks.





	On Ice

Frank has met some informants in weird locations over the years. Flops, bars, subway tunnels. Wide open parking lots at abandoned malls, very awkwardly in strip club champagne rooms. 

A pretentious burger place fronting the north end of Central Park at 11AM on a bright Spring morning, however, has so far _ not _ been a place where people like to make contact with him. They usually don’t text on his private number either, the one given out to people he could count on one hand. Random informants sure as shit don’t text ‘we gotta talk about nathan’ and drop a map link to some place where four stars on Google reviews doesn't make up for a basic cheeseburger costing ten fuckin’ bucks. 

He tells himself that he's just here out of curiosity, that he's lining up in this brightly lit faux hipster corporate shithole and ordering a double with bacon and waffle fries just ‘cause he wants to know who the hell has his phone number _ and _ fuck up his cholesterol for good measure.

Anything else beyond that is just… well, it's just something else to worry about. He hasn't heard from Cable in nearly a year. If someone if trying to use their working relationship as blackmail material then they're shit outta luck ‘cause that ship has long since sailed. 

That's what he tells himself. Better to write it off as done than admit that he must've crashed and burned and been too dumb to realise it was happening until he looked at his phone and realised it had been a week gone, then a month, and now nearly a year of total silence. Anything is better than occasionally waking up at three in the afternoon to toss and turn and indulge in the wasteful distraction of wallowing in resentful shitty thoughts about being dumped, both personally and professionally.

Or, here and now, being stupid enough to get distracted by something so unimportant while he's sitting at the counter window of a brightly lit burger bar. Gotta focus. He's got a pretty good eye on the joint behind him courtesy of a polished paper napkin dispenser, and the comforting weight of a well concealed handgun pushing snug against his ribs to keep him grounded. 

He can sulk afterwards over the fact that nearly a year later, all it takes is a text to get him instantly raw over getting 86ed by a guy he wasn't even dating. Gotta focus. Right now he’s gonna get to the bottom of whoever decided to lure him out in public at a fuckin’ burger bar of all places, then, depending on his mood, maybe today was the day they were going to regret making Frank relive some embarrassing personal shit in the privacy of his own head. 

He’s halfway through unwrapping his double cheese - one eye on the early lunch crowd, one eye concentrating on not letting the entire back end of the burger squirt onto the bench - when a tray drops to the bench next to him

“Heya Frank.”

He's got no idea who she is. Red hair in a bun, unlined face. Young. He’s got a pretty good mental Rolodex built up over the years and a mean knack for names and faces, but he’s drawing a blank on her entirely.

She laughs and _ says look at me _ low under her breath. For a brief moment her face slides, blurs, and Frank feels like he's been punched in the gut. She's got Cable's starburst scar ‘round her eye. He’s never seen anyone else with one like it. 

He's got no idea who the hell she is. 

She frowns and sighs, and the smooth veil of her image inducer slips back over her features. “He didn't tell you much about his home life, huh?”

“Who,” manages Frank, voice tight. 

“Nathan, of course.” She looks at him like he's stupid. “Summers? My dad?”

“Dad?” This time his voice gets a little loud and the young woman rolls her eyes and flashes an apologetic smile over her shoulder, placating the curious onlookers at the tables behind them. It drops from her face the second she turns back to him, wiped out clean by an uncomfortable grimace. 

“Yikes,” she says finally. “This is awkward. He didn't tell you about me, did he?” She pauses and shakes her head. “Sorry. I'm Hope, if that rings any bells…?”

“Hope?” He sounds like a colossal idiot, stupidly repeating one word sentences with a rapidly congealing $13.75 burger in his hand. “I'm…”

“Unbelievable,” she mutters to herself, picking up a fry and salting it liberally. “He's such an asshole.”

Frank puts down his burger and thinks very carefully about what to say next. He's gotta give it to this girl, whoever she is. She was smart enough to have this conversation in a public place where Frank was going to be very careful about not bellowing his next sentence in an apoplectic fury. 

“Thanks,” she - Hope - says casually, salting her next fry. She taps the side of her head without waiting for Frank’s reaction. “Telepath, just like Nathan. He was right, you know. You are _ really _ loud when you think.”

Jesus. If she really is Summers’ kid then she's almost as good at knocking a sentence out from underneath him as her old man. If. That's one hell of a big _ if _ to take on face value. 

“Give me a second,” he says. Outside the thin spring sunshine is making the oaks look a beautiful glossy deep green, healthy and vibrant for the first time in months. He stares at the leaves and the way they move in concert in the wind, trying to marshal his thoughts together. “I haven't seen Cable in nearly a year.”

“He's--”

“Let me finish,” he says firmly. “I haven't seen or heard from him in months. He never mentioned having a kid. I don't know who you are.” He scowls at her, ignoring the way she's salting yet another fry into hell. “Start explaining or I'm leaving.”

“Wow,” Hope says dryly. “With diplomacy like that, no wonder he’s into you.”

The present tense in that sentence doesn't slip past him for a second. “Is? He's alive? He's okay?” Good thing he’s so practiced at keeping the delighted fizz of optimism at bay. Can't be disappointed when you're not optimistic. Can’t be disappointed if this is just some set-up to fuck him around. 

She makes a face. “In a manner of speaking. Hey, I can…” She waves her fingers next to her temple, a tight circle clockwise, and Frank stares at her. It's the same motion Cable used - uses? - when explaining impenetrable telepath nonsense to Frank, sarcastically waving his fingers like he's Kreskin or some bullshit. 

“I'm just saying it might be easier if I can show you,” she says gently.

A light pressure pushes against the base of Frank’s brain and his body acts before his brain can catch up, instinct and self preservation roaring up like a fighting dog off its leash. He shoves his chair back so fast that it squeals against the hipster chic bare concrete floor. 

He's going, he's gone. 

Fuck staying incognito, fuck the soggy burger and untouched basket of waffle fries. Half the room could sell his picture to the Bugle and he wouldn't give a shit, just as long as he can get the hell out of there and away from that feeling of his brain getting squeezed by someone he doesn't know and every kind of threat that implies. 

Hope catches up halfway through the conservatory garden, falling into step alongside him and jiggling a soggy takeout bag from hand to hand. 

“Sorry,” she says through a mouthful of fries. “He said you were squirrelly about that. Getting your brain, y’know, touched. I forgot.”

“Stay outta my head,” he says between gritted teeth. “Get lost while you're at it.”

“Hey. _ Hey_.” 

His legs freeze, locked in place by the oppressive invisible force holding him still, a pressure lighter than air and heavy as lead. “Oh, fuck _ off _,” he says tiredly. He knows there's no point in fighting it, his animal instinct to get free reluctantly tamed by experience in just giving up and waiting for Cable to let him go. 

“Is this trick a family specialty? You all like trapping people?”

“Oh yeah, pretty much,” she says casually. “One of the first things Dad taught me when my psionic shit manifested. Come and sit with me, Francis. We have some stuff to talk about.”

They sit on a bench just past the formal gardens, the takeout bag left in the no man’s land between them like a demarcation line. He grits his teeth and nods in acquiesce, braced for the feeling of someone messing around with his brain. 

The images she slots into his head are quick and clean. In her memories Cable is a towering giant, gleaming gold by campfire light and gleaming gold by terrible muzzle flash and explosives and burning cities. He doesn’t recognise the land they’re crossing or the buildings they squat in, but he knows Cable. Knows the shape of him. Knows the way he stands, the way he sleeps sitting up with his rifle readied over his knees, the practiced isosceles stance he takes when firing that stupid oversized hard light cannon. 

Deep down to his bones, he knows that's Cable

For the first time in a long time he feels his miserable carbonised heart lurch ‘cause, jesus christ, he misses him so fucking much. If her memories are of him looking at her with such pride and care and exasperated fondness, then he'll believe her ‘cause she's not shy about the way she misses Cable too. 

The raw emotion soaks the pictures in his head, saturated with so much sadness, overlaying his own feelings that he's forbidden himself from doing more than glancing at, uneasy at what he’ll find. 

This girl, young lady, whatever, is Cable's daughter. He believes her now. Stupid to do it without hard proof, the rational part of his brain is screaming for evidence, but he knows that breed of sadness deep down to his bones. Some things are impossible to fake and some losses are too deep to imitate. 

“Still don't know what you want with me,” he says gruffly. “Your old man and I aren't. We aren't working together. And drop the inducer, it's giving me a headache.”

_ Mmph_, she says through a mouthful of fries, and obliges him without argument. The starburst scar reappears around her eye, so familiar and yet entirely foreign. “That's what you kids call it? Working together?”

He glares at her, ignoring the hot flush he can feel crawling over his cheeks. “That's--”

“Oh please,” she says with a laugh. “That's cute. Not needed, but it's cute.” She digs in the bag for a handful of cold fries, then offers it to him, shaking the paper until he gives in and takes a handful for himself. The bottom layer is made up of his waffle fries, soggy and room temperature and clearly stolen straight from his plate after he bailed. 

“Dad doesn't hide anything from me,” she continues. “Does? Didn't? He didn't. Shit, this gets complicated.”

“We didn't talk about our personal lives,” he says defensively, instantly wondering what the hell has happened to his life that he's feeling any kind of need to justify himself to someone too young to buy a six-pack. “It's not like we swapped family trees.”

“Nah. You just swapped spit.” She grins at the pissy expression settling on his face. “Hey, Francis, I understand. I mean if we’re being honest here, I don't like that I didn't rate a mention in two years of your, uh, business arrangement, but… I understand. It’s a smart plan. He doesn't mention me, it minimises fallout if you got divorced. Dad wouldn't be Dad if he didn't have five contingency plans ready just to do a munchies run.” She does a bad job of hiding the fact she just felt Frank’s immediate mental bristling at at least three things in her past few sentences. “Jokes,” she says. “It's jokes. You're not divorced. You're just, I dunno, on ice. You're sleeping on the couch until someone gets sick of the timeline and fixes everything.”

“That bad?”

Hope sits back on the bench, tipping the bag up to shake the last of Frank’s cold soggy fries into her mouth. “I'm doing you a favour ‘cause you make Dad happy,” she says matter of factly, once she's chewed everything down enough to talk. “Right now he’s a younger, stupider version of himself. I'd kill him and do us all a favourto get Dad back if I didn't think it’d break the river of time.”

Frank laughs despite himself. “He sounds like a winner.”

She nods. “Yeah. Says a whole lot about your taste, huh. Look,” she says, cutting him off before he can burr up. “I can tell you everything and it'll be weird for you if you two, y’know, pick up again later. Or I can tell you just the stuff that'll make your brain hurt but you'll know enough to know what happened. Pick one.”

He frowns, staring at his hands. He values tactical information, ‘specially on the cape and powers crowd, but a selfish bit of him only cares about his-- his--

“The not weird version,” he says eventually. “Probably gonna regret not taking free intel, but. Yeah. Tell me what I should know.”

Hope twists sideways so she can sit in an uncomfortable-looking amalgam of teenage elbows and knees, her chin propped on her hand. “He's not dead,” she says, her expression serious. “There's been… I dunno how to explain this to someone who doesn't time travel, no offence. There have been some people out of their time living in this time. The word ‘time’ is going to happen a lot here. Sorry.” She stares into the distance, past the conservatory garden rails, gathering her thoughts. “One person moving around the time stream doesn't do much, most of the time. It's like a rushing river. Most of the time one person can't change the way it flows except in small ways, and that's what Dad does most of the time he's not with you or me. He sorta… I guess you'd describe it as him patrolling the river. Making sure the flow stays uninterrupted.”

“Keeps the river banks tidy,” Frank ventures, and almost smiles back when Hope grins at him. 

“Yeah. Exactly. But a lot of people out of time together is enough to start messing with the river’s current. It blocks things now, it changes things downstream. And there were a _ lot _ of X-Men out of their time recently.” She stares at him intently, measuring him up. If he hadn't noticed the shades of Cable around the set of her mouth and the look in her eyes, he sure as shit noticed it now. “Dad made a mistake. He let them stay ‘cause he thought that when they went back to their own time they'd be able to avoid the things that have happened to us. Maybe they'd be able to do better.”

“But the river broke its banks.”

“Yup. Turns out it really messed up a whole lot of stuff in the future. Dad is… you know Nathan is from the future, right?”

...no.

No, he did not. 

“Huh,” he says eventually. “Shit.”

She gives him that long searching look, the same one he's received hundreds of times from her old man, and he wonders how he's ever managed to achieve this level of calm since Cable slammed his way into in his life. 

“Wow,” she says, clearly at a loss. “Most people take that bombshell a lot harder. You know, you two have _ really _ got to work on your communication when he gets back to normal.”

“I’m starting to realise that,” he says dryly. “Keep going.”

“It messed up the flow of time enough that Dad in the future, and I mean like, young Dad, younger than me, decided to fix it. So he fixed it.”

Frank waits for an elaboration that doesn't come, looking at her expectantly. 

Hope sighs. “He fixed it by travelling back to now and killing himself.” She puts up a hand, cutting him off. “Don't think of it that way. Logan says - you know Wolverine? The old one?”

Frank nods just once, keenly aware that there's a teenage telepath at his side. He is painfully careful to not think about how much he truly knows Logan, and the twitch at the corner of Hope’s mouth makes it clear that the effort is barely paying off.

“He says Dad managed to do the world’s first simultaneous murder-suicide on himself.”

He laughs ‘til he wheezes. It's not funny in the slightest except that it is, because of course it fucking is. Of course Cable didn't ghost him. That's too normal, ‘cause he got in with a mutant and as far as he knows mutants don't _ do _ normal. Of course it was mutant bullshit. Of course he got killed by his younger self in a convoluted plot to--

“Hope, none of that shit plan makes any sense. At all.”

Hope shrugs. “He's sixteen. I don't think he thought anything more beyond Dad being soft for letting them stay so he aced himself. Three shots, textbook. Just like he taught me. ‘Cause I guess Nathan is always gonna be Nathan, so if he's gonna do something then he might as well overdo it.” She picks up the empty takeout bag and looks inside it mournfully before crumpling it up and tossing it to the nearest bin. An invisible force carries it the last few feet, making a showy little loop before dropping neatly in the trash. “Y'know, I don't know who he is, this new... god, what's the stupid nickname they gave him? Kid Cable. He's Nathan but he's not Dad. He's Nathan but he's not your Nathan.” 

She sighs again, skinny shoulders rising and falling like pitching seas. “I didn't show you much before. About Dad and me, early. He went through hell to keep me safe and now he's gone. There's some annoying skinny brat with his name but he doesn't know me and maybe he'll never know me.” Hope laughs, sharp and bitter. “And this is the first time I've said any of this out loud and it's with the guy he was convinced was gonna dump him every week ‘cause he wasn't good enough.”

Frank blinks but, for once, opts to keep his mouth shut. Some misconceptions were too big to be tackled head on, and as far as misconceptions go, that one was _ way _ out of his wheelhouse; a towering mountain of wrong ideas, unapproachable from every direction without half a six pack and some Thai food under his belt first. 

She slumps forward, elbows on her knees. “He's not gone,” she says. “He's just… not himself. Or he's too much himself.” She glances at him, eyes darting away once she catches him watching her. “He'll be back,” she says finally. Maybe she's trying to reassure them both. “He always comes back.”

“I hope so,” says Frank. He'd pat her on the shoulder if he didn't suspect she'd take his arm off at the elbow. “I miss working with him.”

“Sure.”

“Not that many people I work with. We did well together.”

Hope sits back and looks at him intently. He can feel her skimming the surface of his thoughts, sampling his mood. The feel of her, the shape of her touching gently against his brain, is so much like her old man that for a second he feels distinctly homesick for a home he hasn't even got. “He liked you a lot. Likes you, I guess.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

They sit in silence for a long minute, watching the breeze ripple through the trees. 

Weird, Frank thinks. It's the first time in years he's just sat in the sunshine and watched nothing. Not tailing a perp. Not planning an attack, not scoping the landscape. Even when he's holed up in his cabin, as far away from the city as it was possible to be, he's always been recuperating from injury or focused on training, never taking the time to look at the endless green ocean of trees and simply existing. 

Cable would like it up there, he thinks. Up in his cabin, miles away from anywhere. He'd like to take him up there when he comes back. 

If he comes back. 

If he remembers Frank at all. 

His gut lurches at that. Stupid, he thinks to himself, rote habit. Stupid and weak. 

“We’re X-Men,” Hope says, then pauses, considering. “Or we’re X-Men adjacent, I guess. X-Men-ish enough that we always come back eventually. Dad will come back, and I hope he’ll be my dad. And your ‘colleague’--,” she makes air quotes with her fingers and smirks at him, “--will be back.”

He can feel the traitorous hot prickle of a flush warming his cheeks. “We just worked together.”

“Not a chance, Francis,” she says cheerfully, tapping the side of her head. “You can't lie to me. Besides, remember what I said? Dad doesn't hide anything.”

“Jesus. I hope he doesn't share everything with you,” he mutters. His face feels like it's on fire. 

“Gross. Just enough to know where he stands, Francis,” she says, and unfolds herself off the bench with the limber agility of someone still too young to make involuntary noises when getting up. 

He stays where he is, selfishly unwilling to let this moment of peace slip through his fingers. “He’s a skinny kid? Really?”

“Like a beanpole. It's so weird.” She gives him a considering look, the feel of her fingering through his brain light and unthreatening. “You kept that text I sent you?”

“Yeah. Needed the address you sent to see if you were legit.”

“Keep it. Keep in touch.” 

“Pick a better burger place next time.” He squints up at her, her red hair glowing under the cool Spring sun. “I like All-America over in Brooklyn.”

“Gross,” she says again, pulling a face. “Don't they have all those health code warnings on the door?”

“Adds to the flavour,” he says, and grins when Hope claps her hands and points at him in congratulations on landing a joke. The sunburst scars around her eyes wrinkle up when she laughs, just like Cable’s do. “Catch you around, Hope.”

“Be good to my dad, Francis,” she says. “Take him on a date when he gets back.”

She thumbs a switch on her belt and she's gone in a sliver of cold blue light, barely visible in the sunlight. Then he's alone, his face tilted to the sun. 

He should move. It's not safe to be so exposed like this, easily spotted and easily hunted. But he's a fool, and he's sentimental, and he's tired. 

Frank breathes in the smell of warm grass and lets the weak Spring sun warm his face for a minute. Just one minute more. 

**Author's Note:**

> In this series I choose to acknowledge Kid Cable/Bable one (1) time.
> 
> [stryfeposting.tumblr.com](http://stryfeposting.tumblr.com)


End file.
